20 yrs ago 2day, teh 1st txt msg wuz snt

Twenty years ago today, a British software engineer had the honor of sending the very first text message. You may be delighted to know that it was grammatically correct and each of the two words sent was spelled correctly.

On Dec. 3, 1992, 22-year old Neil Papworth sent the words “Merry Christmas” to a Vodafone executive attending a holiday party on the other side of town, which was Newbury in the United Kingdom.

“Then it came to a day when they wanted to send this message and I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but I was the one who was down there and so I was the one who got to send it in the end.

“The message was ‘Merry Christmas’. It was to a man called Richard Jarvis, he was a director at Vodafone at the time who was at the Vodafone Christmas party on the other side of town.”

Clearly, that one message was the start of something big. The CTIA wireless trade group estimated in June that, in the U.S. alone, cell phone users sent more than 184.3 billion text messages. It has become such a dominant way of communicating that voice calls on mobile phones are in decline.

And texting itself is evolving. Short Message Service texts, which ride over control frequencies used by wireless carriers, are declining as more users of smartphones rely on data-based options, such as Apple’s iMessage. People love the simplicity, speed and efficiency of text messaging — even if it is butchering grammar and spelling skills!

Related: On the 20th anniversary of the text message, law enforcement officials are asking Congress to require telcos to keep a record of customers’ SMS transmissions for at least two years.

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and other wireless providers would be required to record and store information about Americans’ private text messages for at least two years, according to a proposal that police have submitted to the U.S. Congress.

CNET has learned a constellation of law enforcement groups has asked the U.S. Senate to require that wireless companies retain that information, warning that the lack of a current federal requirement “can hinder law enforcement investigations.”

from the article: “Clearly, that one message was the start of something big. The CTIA wireless trade group estimated in June that, in the U.S. alone, cell phone users sent more than 184.3 billion text messages.”

My brother is probably responsible for 183.8 billion of those text messages…

Gee, if we weren’t sending text messages over PROFs, though we originally called it EOS, in the late 1970s, then what were we doing back then? It may have not been the Internet, but it was a private mainframe network stretching from Calgary to Houston and from Denver to Chicago.